sure protect and defend the constitution of the united states the constitution of the united states so help you god shore help me god for graduation mr berg. and with those words president obama begins his second term as commander and chief so what can we expect during the next four years and how did he live up to his pledges in the first term. hello and welcome to our t. is special coverage of the second inauguration of president barack obama today will be taking a look back at what has defined president obama's first term as well as what lies

ahead from civil rights to foreign policy will dig deep into the real topics and issues that presses the u.s. today start off i want to bring in our panel r.t. correspondent meghan lopez and host of breaking the set here on r.t. abby martin great to have you all here to be here so big day here in washington d.c. . i guess want to start off with with the big inauguration speech president obama is kind of known for his passionate speech is kind of a rallying up the people he famously said there is no red states there's no blue states there's the united states but of course the reality here we are today the beginning of the second term is that. we have a very divided congress and we see very sharp difference differences between the red states and the blue states so despite kind of his rhetoric of unity did the president not deliver on this promise or. was this out of his hands. well you know within the his two thousand and eight speech he talked about. rebuilding the

culture and remaking america that was really something that he highlighted in his two thousand and eight speech then you know what the culture has been remade but it's been remade in a way that many americans didn't like we've got a congress as you mention that is more divided than ever only twenty two percent of americans right now support the republican party obviously they took a battering with mitt romney's loss but they still hold the house and what's really important is that historically between a divided congress where you have the democrats in control of the senate in the republicans and the hop control of the house you always have this kind of tension for very little was actually done so this kind of time around you know his speech was really about unity about bringing the country together and not only bringing these red states these blue states together but really bringing the lawmakers together we have a lot of things that have to be addressed in the near future things like you know the debt ceiling seaquest ration appropriations there's so many things that they need to agree on that it's all it's not likely that they will be fighting in the

future so we'll see if that unity actually how do you think having a have that same kind of message of unity back and you know back i don't know how much more united you could be across republican lines i mean you could talk a big game about you know bringing the country together but i mean here we have a president that really did pursue so many republican policies really adopting a lot of the bush administration foreign policy and surveillance domestic policy here so i mean when he's talking about over a country divided yeah i think it's more about class division class warfare instead of red versus blue that's just a dichotomous thing to say it's kind of divide and conquer i mean throughout the campaign we saw so much hateful rhetoric coming from both parties in these campaign advertisements and really dividing the country even more when really we're ignoring the bigger picture here which is the us versus them the ninety nine percent versus the one percent which i think is really where the division lies deeply in this case he didn't mention something about that in his speech today talking about the middle class and how they need to come back up he didn't exactly. use the terms ninety

nine percent versus one percent but you might as well have there's a lot of kind of underlying messages in the terms that he did for a lot of people the speech was actually pretty surprising because it laid out a lot more than people thought it would back in two thousand and eight his speech was very generic talking about the hope and change that americans saw and obviously that hope and change wasn't didn't come to fruition as many people wanted it to that's why you know the crowd was eight hundred thousand people as opposed to two million people so you know now we're kind of seeing this this real middle class warfare between between the people of the middle class versus the one percent that speaking of this hope and change of course the inauguration lands on martin luther king day we're going to have to. make very excited about that at five pm here at r t one issue with his father really trying to bring to attention is this issue of poverty in america. and these kind of these numbers kind of put it into perspective

if we could bring them up there a look at the poverty numbers and nine hundred sixty eight that is the year that martin luther king jr was assassinated we see in one nine hundred sixty eight twenty five point four million poor americans eleven poor children flash forward to today that's we have forty six point two million poor americans sixteen point one million poor children. makes you wonder how dr martin luther king how he would do this today and how how we got to this point. and what's being done to address this issue that is just exacerbating i think dr martin luther king would look to do extremely symbolic and revolutionary in the sense that of course we're electing the first african-american male for the second time huge victory seeing as where we were just fifty years ago where black people couldn't you know the right to vote but on the other hand i think seeing that militarism and wars of aggression and imperial. and even the extrajudicial assassination campaigns i mean i think he

would he would be appalled he'd be embarrassed to even be affiliated with you know signing in on his bible i think in one term symbolically it's great but on the other hand i mean it's just so unfortunate that really this legacy of his is kind of overshadowed when he really was vocally against the vietnam war and all the stuff but i mean in terms of poverty i think that these numbers really do tell it all i mean what else can you say than looking at these stats and say we have not addressed the crux of the problem in this country which is poverty and when you look at just the corporate control the debt the enormous student debt the crippling debt on people with education health care i mean i think these things obamacare as some would call it is a step in the right direction but i mean it's set in stone already can we really go farther than that is it really solving the problem when people are so crippled with a financial burden write anything off of that past four years we've seen wages and

welfare increased by thirty three percent so let's quite a lot and one of the very important parts of today's speech that you hear we're going to take it on all the different segments i'm talking about medicare medicaid and social security so we'll have to see how the republicans handle these type of entitlement programs are you guys are going to continue this conversation in a little bit a lot to talk about this historical day that was artsy correspondent meghan lopez and host of breaking the set abby martin we're going to get back to our panel in just a little bit but before that there is always a lot of hype surrounding the president's inauguration speech it sets the tone for what lies ahead but is it mere rhetoric or do the words lead to action or to correspondent christine for his out takes a look at president obama's inaugural address four years ago how that message compares to his remarks today. on this day prescribed by a law. and marked by ceremony forty four americans have now taken

the presidential oath it's an unbreakable tradition with a simple purpose an address to the nation and assurance of a new beginning today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent america what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility and recognition on the part of every american that we have duties to ourselves our nation and the world please raise your right hand and repeat after me president obama is the third president in iran to serve a second term and like those before him his second to address was focused and flowery and he used the rhetorical tool of repetition to convey his theme we. the people very few presidents in fact have given notable second inaugural addresses with the exception perhaps of abraham lincoln who speech occurred as the civil war was winding down he emphasized unity and

a time of healing for all americans president clinton's would come just before the scandal involving monica lewinsky at a time when the u.s. economy was healthy and strong once again our economy is the strongest on earth once again we are building stronger families thriving communities better educational opportunities a cleaner environment. problems that once seemed destined to deepen now then to our efforts president george w. bush's second inaugural was delivered to a nation still trying to heal from the attacks of september eleventh and as a justification for the wars he started in response to those attacks we are led by events and common sense to one conclusion. the survival of liberty in our land. increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. the best hope for peace in our world is the

expansion of freedom in all the world while they may shed a bit of light on the times overall inaugural speeches are more inspirational postcard and policy outline a superior language with inferior content we must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. but we were just the belief that america must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build that future the future for this country still wide open and uncertain now when the crowds die down and the celebrations come to an end the president says he wants to get back to work immediately looking back you may remember his candidacy and his rise to power were built on a strong foundation of hope and change all this time around people say words won't be enough this time around people are expecting results in washington christine for

sound our team. president obama kicks off a second term matter critical critical time for foreign policy from fear over iran's nuclear ambitions to uprisings in the middle east and now an increasingly volatile situation in north africa interestingly enough there was very little very little mention of foreign policy in the president's inauguration speech today what are our panel again now to discuss so one of the big things one of the big promises the president made four years ago he vowed to leave iraq and afghanistan it appears he's doing that to some extent is that a promise fulfilled to some extent yes although you can argue you know when we have a strategic pact signed with cars as administration to keep troops there in a support role till two thousand and twenty four i mean what about the special ops what about the contractors wars are outsourced now so yes bringing troops home some balik way once again that's a good move you rock is a total disaster it's

a pretty much an all out civil war at this point so really it was a complete failure yes he did bring the troops home but who's really left there are these enormous bases it was never really we never were really going to leave these countries they're more like launching pads for gemini in the world right that's a very strong word. yeah i mean to say that we're leaving we're still going. have a presence there it's not like we're going to leave pack up and just a career. and we have bases there we still have troops there i mean this is this is the way america operates when it comes to foreign policy you know speaking of just kind of relocating what's making the headlines now is africa especially in the wake of what happened in algeria the crisis in mali these clashes with with militants in somalia and yemen. it's pretty it's projected that the u.s. is going to ramp up drone attacks in that region so are we just seeing ok you know

we are pulling out of afghanistan we are pulling out of iraq but are we just seeing a transfer of resources and even a transfer of. a different focus for the military i would say yes it's foreign efforts going obviously the french are leading the way in mali but the u.s. of course of the french and the french have supported the u.s. in the past another region that's really important to focus on that i think you could say the resources and the attention is really turning to more so is the asia pacific region we saw president obama get together with the australian president we are talking about shifting importance in that region i think that we're going to see a big shift away from the middle east but still with our lead from the behind kind of strategy not necessarily intervening like we saw in syria you know kind of letting that play out but also using diplomatic rights we have to to kind of influence the change that we want to see we're seeing actual military ships into

the asia pacific region some could argue that it's even worse i mean yes you're not having ground troops there really but when you're shifting to two purely these drone wars completely counterintuitive completely counterproductive ninety eight percent failure rate according to a harvard joint harvard n.y.u. study eight months extensive study in pakistan show that these are an enormous failure they do more harm than good. i have dubbed obama the drone king because he's really taken this and ran with it so hard and now you're like you said expanding into or africa it really is just so that makes me question why is this even something that we're located in our resources kind of going along with that i want to talk more about afghanistan and pakistan where the obama administration has been conducting a lot of these drone strikes and speaking of challenges and the upcoming terror winning over the hearts and minds of the people that live in these places where these operations are being conducted it looks like it's going to continue to be

a challenge we know that pakistan and. the effect of the drone campaign there it's kind of been a backlash in terms of how they view the u.s. so the foreign minister of pakistan came on a recent tour of the u.s. interested the biggest threat in pakistan right now is drones she said before nine eleven there was zero suicide bombings in pakistan and there's been over three hundred ninety or something that might not be the correct figure but very astronomical increase in suicide bombings because it shows how in the instability in the region once you're launching these unmanned drones these these aerial robots that are just killing people indiscriminately with a ninety percent failure rate of course i mean what is that going to really do to the country winning the hearts and minds i mean that's absurd and you know this taking another look at what drones actually accomplish we've had guests on our team several times and every single one of them kind of reverberates the same criticism when it comes to drones meaning that just from a tactical standpoint killing

a person versus capturing them you lose a slew of information a slew of intelligence so you might be killing the people that are organizing these these attacks right now but you're not necessarily preventing future attacks by gathering the intelligence that these people hold also another point to bring up that critics. have brought up is that anybody over the age of fourteen. i think it is qualifies as a potential militant so anybody in pakistan and afghanistan that is over fourteen is potentially a bad guy and that's not necessarily the case it's just that they fall within the some fortunate age range of their kind of stipulation being that they're male what so offensive when john brennan comes out and says we haven't had any civilian casualties with drone strikes if you're counting every military age male in just a region of a strike zone as a militant and you're not counting them as dead and these double tap methods they haven't mean it's completely outrageous of the rhetoric that we're coming from the

establishment about the successful operations of drones when really we know the hard truth and despite this controversy it seems like whether we like it or not that this drone that this is this is the future of warfare this is the future of the way that the military is going to conduct their military operations and i hear that time and time again from military officials from government officials that way it's it's cheaper you're not putting our troops there on the ground so all these benefits are just yesterday and reuters this made the news ten suspected al qaeda operatives were killed by an explosion in a house in south yemen where they were making bombs this is in their report so some people say you know it's working. on another point to bring up but when it comes to these drones is the fact that we've seen. time after time president obama and other stepping up to say this is why we need them the simple fact is that drones are

popular because it requires no american lives people hate seeing soldiers die it's heart wrenching story when you have to cover those funerals in the caskets with the flags draped over them but also there is a playbook that's coming out that the white house is trying to finish the details of a manual called the playbook designed to establish clear rules for these targeted killings this is the newest information coming out about targeted drone strikes them saying now that we're going to clarify. a little bit more who we're going to hit with these romo thank goodness because just recently she said that the district judge said that she sided with obama when in terms of classification of why we're killing people with drones who they are and what intelligence we're getting and really what the successful nature is of these targeted assassination she totally sided with him she said you know it's completely like a fairy tale that this is somehow constitutional but obama's created a legal framework to really allow this kind of practice i think one of the scary things or what puts people at unease with the drone program is how secretive it is

there's a lot that we don't know about it. and advocates are now pushing for at least some transparency. i think it's just really simple when you're looking at how if this is counterintuitive or not if it's really working like establishment touts i mean if a bomb kills you in your family i'm sure your friends and relatives will. be galvanized and become radicalized against the people who murder their family i mean that's as simple as it gets really yeah and you know they might not have been terrorists before terrorists but right there is we are seeing some of that we are seeing some of the backlash and some of the consequences of that. very interesting conversation but i know that meghan has kind of a report card on president obama's performance in his first term when you. wrote we're going to take a look at some of the proc campaign promises he made in two thousand and eight versus the actual results so if the job of politicians is to make promises then the

job of journalists is to hold them to their word in that spirit let's follow some of the big changes president obama promised during his first term so let's start with the topic we were just just discussing foreign policy foreign wars and the u.s. intervention applied four years ago the u.s. was embroiled in two seemingly endless wars today u.s. troops have been out of iraq for almost a year. so is that mission accomplished well that's too soon to say with secretary and violence instability and terror attacks they continue to plague the country meanwhile in afghanistan we've seen an increase in green on blue violence where afghan troops turn on their nato forces that are actually training them president obama met with president karzai earlier this month to hammer out the details of nato troop withdrawals in two thousand and fourteen but we'll have to see how that actually plays out in future terms next up energy independence during his first inaugural address president obama stressed the importance of alternative energy his

commitment to u.s. energy independence was reiterated today. the past towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult but america cannot resist this transition we must lead it we cannot see the other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries we must claim its promise that's how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure. plus far the president hasn't really practiced what he's preached the cylinder of scandal is the most visible result of his failed inner g. policies wherein a solar power company went bankrupt losing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the form of grants president obama has successfully put thousands of acres of land on the auction block so that companies can drill for oil much so that much of this land is in the gulf coast despite the worst oil spill in u.s.

history that being the b.p. oil spill taking place under his watch and the keystone pipeline still needs a final yes or no from the president meanwhile something all americans have a stake in is jobs the unemployment rate is at seven point eight percent right now after being above eight percent for years really in september of two thousand and eleven president obama introduced his american jobs act the congress has yet to vote on the full bill while unemployment has been stubbornly high during the past four years bloomberg reported that corporate after tax profits are up one hundred seventy one percent that brings me to wall street whose actions contributed to the biggest financial crisis of our era the comprehensive dog reform bill was passed in two thousand and ten but only one third of those rules that were outlawed have actually been written since the financial crisis five banks now control fifty six percent of the u.s. economy according to the federal reserve five years ago that number was just forty

three percent too big to fail has perhaps gotten much bigger and perhaps most egregious of all none of the executives who caused the financial crisis have been held accountable for their individual actions with criminal charges finally health care the affordable care act was ruled constitutional by the u.s. supreme court over the summer it was a huge victory for president obama and the democrats though it has yet to be fully implemented and faces roadblocks on the state level clearly it's been. mixed bag for president obama during his first term but as today proves the voters are going to give him a second chance and to finish what he started back in two thousand and nine that's what i've got for you liz thanks megan thanks again very interesting but we are going to turn now to president obama who has a valid to have a transparent administration but her staff indicate let's turn now to our panel to discuss welcome back. abby i know you have

a lot of strong feelings about this how have our rights to privacy eroded in the last four years or has it all it's just funny to hear a politician campaigning on transparency and then to turn around and view almost the least transparent administration i mean even more closed off than the bush administration the greed just war crackdown on whistleblowers more whistleblowers prosecuted than any other administration combined i mean this is how much and here he is touting how important whistleblowers are to really protect democracy i'm in love with obama's words and rhetoric i wish that that's really what he did as president but you know in terms of privacy i mean it's astounding to see a constitutional law professor a lawyer who knows the constitution back and forth to really vote with the patriot act reauthorize the patriot act violated our first fourth. amendments here of the bill of rights completely voted for pfizer expansion speaking of. that is the

foreign intelligence surveillance act it was renewed in the senate and what it does essentially is extend this warrantless wiretapping. it was extended to two thousand and seventeen it grants the government this wide surveillance authority. senator wyden it is one outspoken critic here's what he had to say about this. certainly the government. there has been a violation of the fourth amendment. sections of the originals part. of this hong. kong government i'm just not going to say so this is standard way of doing business. and he's not alone privacy advocates like the a.c.l.u. and the electronic frontier foundation have also spoken out against it and as we have mentioned before president obama has vowed to have a more transparent administration is this yet another example that that in fact is

not the way it played out i would say his his continuation of the surveillance state really expansion of the bush era surveillance policy is one of the most egregious failures of the obama administration especially because he knows better he knows exactly what he's doing and that's what makes it so disturbing and what we really saw with that why in a minute that was subsequently turned down by the congress was the senator wyden and senator udall and others really just wanting to know the basics of this fight what kind of information it collects on whom they want to know something things like how many people are being severely surveilled for instance and whether communications between americans are being reviewed or whether it's just between americans and people in foreign countries so facts like that that we haven't actually gotten any answers to and that we aren't going to get any answers to in the future and in the time in the near future anyway it also was made back in one

thousand seventy eight and it's definitely ramped up from one thousand nine hundred eighty eight to two thousand and eight and then today the bill has changed even more dramatically. kind of treating the u.s. as more of a surveillance state now than it did before and when and why didn't i actually tried to get these answers that you were saying very basic answers how many people are you surveilling why their justification for not giving these answers was that it would be an invasion of your privacy if we told you how many people were being spied on so that's the double speak we see kind of coming is that we should. really interesting guys and we are going to leave it off there but we're going to be right back here to bring you the latest on what we have a lot more going to be talking about social issues going to be talking economy we have martin luther king the third is going to be here. in honor to have him here on this day that we commemorate his father. so stay tuned for that that was abby martin host of breaking the set in our c correspondent megan lopez that is going to

do it for now but for more on the stories we covered you can always check out our you tube page that's youtube dot com slash or is he america or check out our web site r t v dot com slash usa have a great evening. the folks.

want. to get on sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. want to. thank. you.